Reviews: Direct Optimization through \arg \max for Discrete Variational Auto-Encoder

Originality To the best of my knowledge, the insight that the Gumbel-max trick can be combined with direct loss mimization in the VAE setting is novel. Moreover, the work that had to be done to get the ideas to play well together seems significant and original. Quality I have some reservations about the method presented, which is why I've given a slightly negative overall score. However, it seems very plausible that an author response could clarify my concerns and cause me to revise my score upward. Figure 1: -Epsilon and Tau are different variables in quite different settings.